Linda Fahy Newman's garden in West Mount Airy happened gradually, over the last 25 years, with no strict blueprint in mind.

She discovers now, to her surprise, that without planning it, she has pretty much re-created the quintessential English garden of the early 20th century, a design that bores the modern minimalist but continues to excite American gardeners like no other.

It's often described as "controlled chaos," the horticultural response to Victorian industrialization. Newman says simply, "It's a combination of clipped, cultivated and wild - kind of like my hair. And it's a lot more about color and comfort than perfection."

Perfection feels within reach today.

The season's rains have momentarily ceased. Before us, in blessed sunlight, are smooth hedges and breezy beds, "outdoor rooms" and curvy paths, romantic climbers on fences and archways, and a smashing color scheme. She has hot red astilbe, bee balm and hibiscus paired with purple salvia, rose of Sharon and hardy geranium, set off against white clematis and mandevilla.

It's not surprising that Newman's creation feels so English. She's a country girl, born and raised in places with names ending in shire - Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Buckinghamshire - in the Cotswolds, in middle England.

"I think, really, that I was an accidental gardener. Early on, I had no clearly defined desire to become a gardener," Newman says, even though her father was a champion vegetable gardener who once designed a grass tennis court for fun and her late mother was an accomplished flower-grower and arranger.

"She just had a gift for it," Newman says.

In 1984, Newman and her husband, George, a criminal defense lawyer, moved into their 1920s-vintage stone home in the city. It came with carriage house, tennis court, pool - and a full acre of mud and weeds.

The idea to transform it all "just grew out of wanting to make everything look nice," says Newman, an educational and legal writing consultant. "I also think my memories of English gardens kicked in."

In and around juggling two growing boys, now ages 23 and 24, her graduate studies, and a teaching career, Newman began adding compost to the clay soil and "working outside like a maniac from spring till frost."

Today, the "rooms" include four raised beds for vegetables and berries, a shady sitting area, a work area, a woodpile where George does his chipping, fenced-off cubbies for grass clippings and leaf mulch, a woodland garden, and "haphazard, multicolored flower beds" between patio and rented-out carriage house.

The beds, especially, speak to Newman's heritage. Without realizing it, she's been channeling British garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, who created the lush cottage gardens so admired and imitated since the 1920s.

That's when wealthy travelers, including many Philadelphians, began visiting English country houses, observing cottage gardens along the road, and taking notes. "They saw hollyhocks and delphiniums and roses climbing over the front porch," says Jenny Rose Carey, a garden historian and director of the Landscape Arboretum at Temple University Ambler, who grew up in southern England.

They marveled at those "outdoor rooms" separated by pruned boxwoods, stone walls, and zigzaggy "tapestry hedges," like Carey's grandfather's, made of trimmed oak, hawthorn, evergreen, and holly seedlings. And the flowery masses of blue and purple, so elegant in the silvery English light, knocked them out.

"The garden could be the size of a pocket handkerchief but it'll have 100 different species in it. We like to grow everything in there, often cheek by jowl, very comfortable and simple. There aren't many rules," says Carey, adding that the English use compost, shun mulch, and like to fill gaps with self-sowers like larkspur and rose campion.

Jekyll (pronounced JEE-kle), who studied art, anatomy, and color science before deteriorating eyesight nudged her toward horticulture, once mused that the English cottage garden had a "simple and tender charm that one may look for in vain in gardens of greater pretension." Color was a big part of it.

She designed long, impressionist-like drifts of soft pastels or gradations of color that moved subtly from one end of the spectrum to the other. And while she created more than 400 gardens in England and Europe, she did just three in the United States - Elmhurst, near Cincinnati, and in Greenwich and Woodbury, Conn.

Only the Woodbury garden survives, at the 18th-century Glebe House Museum, but Jekyll didn't actually install it. In 1926, just after the museum opened, she was commissioned to design an "old-fashioned garden" there, which she did, sight unseen.

For whatever reason, the garden was never built and the plan was forgotten until the late 1970s, when a graduate student researching Jekyll found it among her archived papers.

Long story short, the U-shaped garden was finally planted in 1990. It's a classic English mixed border measuring 600 feet by 3 feet, with perennials and annuals, hot colors on one side, cool colors on the other, with every other shade and pops of white in between.

"Not only did she look at a garden like a living canvas, but because she couldn't see, she really relied on playing off color and textures, like staged serendipity," says Judith Felz, director of the museum, which counts many gardeners among its 5,000 visitors a year.

They may think those loose drifts of peonies, lilacs, and love-in-a-mist are effortlessly maintained, but, says Felz, "Gertrude Jekyll gardens are really labor-intensive."

Newman knows that all too well. Though recovering from back surgery, she still does what she can, gently deadheading and weeding as we amble down the path, from one "room" to another, in her backyard.

"I can't not garden," she declares.

A Gertrude Jekyll Garden

The Glebe House Museum and Gertrude Jekyll Garden are located at 149 Hollow Rd. in the village center of Woodbury, Conn.

From May through October, hours are 1 to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. In November, hours are 1 to 4 p.m. weekends only. Other times can be arranged by appointment. Call 203-263-2855.

Admission: $5, $2 for children 6 to 12. Garden only is $2.

Information: www.theglebehouse.org/

Contact gardening writer Virginia A. Smith at 215-854-5720 or vsmith@phillynews.com.